MedZilla Articles

JOB HUNTING TOOLS

If you are in the market for a new job, you can greatly improve your chances of landing the gig of your dreams by using sales strategies. When you go on a job interview, it is very similar to selling yourself.

In order to make a hire, companies spend more time going through applications from job seekers who found the job on a job board, than applications that came through the company's own career website, reported The Wall Street Journal.

I became a pharmaceutical sales rep in September. OH MY GOD! I felt like Donald Trump had just said to me, "Monica, you're hired." It was one of the
happiest days of my life. I could not wait to begin a career that would help me become empowered as well as empower others, and play a role in an industry that is critical to health care.

The Basic 'Sniff Test' is easily applied and evident from a cursory inspection of any website. First, there is a phone number for customer service. An email is evident from casual inspection. A name and an address of the actual people, legitimate partnership or incorporated firm that owns the site is on the site. Then there is the "test." Call the number, send the email. Someone actually answers.

Getting beyond the gatekeepers can be one of the most challenging tasks for jobseekers. Gatekeepers can be the most obvious roles in a company, such as administrative or personal assistants to the company's hiring managers, department heads, and executives. But, gatekeepers can be those in less obvious roles as well, such as assistant managers, supervisors, engineers, and so on.

Are you looking for a new career? Pharmaceutical sales may be for you. Pharmaceutical sales and marketing jobs are some of the most sought-after positions in sales because they offer exceptional salaries and unlimited growth potential. The pathway into this job is a difficult one to get on, but you can manage if you are prepared. We've pulled together a Q&A series to help answer those common questions many of you are asking today.

It's easy to cop an attitude in this job market. You're in demand. And it looks like nurses will be in demand for the long term. Your job search might lead to one, two, three or more job offers. Should you grab the job you think you want and blow off the others?

Everyone knows it's against the law, and everyone knows it happens anyway: age discrimination against those who were downsized after working twenty years or more for the same company. It would be unethical to lie about your year of graduation or time spent working, and anyway, isn't a lot of experience supposed to be a good thing?

I have a close friend who is an ace networker. She believes in the power of networking so strongly she started her own non-profit networking association and has kept it going for 10 years. She loves to help others and often turns down offers for work. Two of her favorite sayings are: "I've never met a stranger" and "If you wait until you need a network to build your network, it's too late."

To get that perfect job you must market yourself! One of your most important self-marketing tools is your resume. Your resume is your personal promotional brochure. It showcases your experience and accomplishments for potential employers and your strategy should be to emphasize experience and skills that employers you're interested in are looking for.

Job-hunting can be excruciating for the hunter. Especially if you've gone through the utter rejection of losing your previous job, the hunt for a new one can be identity threatening and rejection filled. Depending on your luck and skills, job hunting can tear down the biggest of egos.

If you're like many Americans this tax season, you spent at least part of last year looking for a job. Whether unemployed or under employed, you likely sent your resume out to someone. Now is your opportunity to cash in those itemized deductions from expenses accumulated during your job search. Perhaps it seems counterintuitive that you would have anything useful to account for during tax time from a period when you weren't actually working. However, whether you found a job or are still looking, those miscellaneous expenses could be your key to maximizing your refund.

Recruiters sound great in concept -- rather than reading the classifieds and applying for jobs directly, you get to sit back and wait for calls to come in. But that's not the whole truth. In the years MedZilla has been helping people like you find your next great job, we've spoken to and worked with plenty of recruiters, and we've put together this article to answer some of your most-frequently asked questions.

Nurses who are willing to travel and make the most of the facilities with the highest demand are left with a golden opportunity. Massachusetts, Maryland, California, New Jersey and Hawaii are the highest paying states currently in the country.

INTERVIEWING

You finally have an interview! Your moment of truth has arrived. Whether your interview is in person or over the phone it is important to make the most of it. Your objective in every interview should be to take yourself one step further toward generating the job offer. You can do that by doing your very best in each and every interview. Treat every interview as if it were the only one you will ever get with that company and your only opportunity to convince them that you are the right candidate for the position.

"How can I calculate my professional worth?" Never base your potential pay rate on the going average; always strive to be above average, and emphasize the positive difference in your performance, compared to your peers

Even though many companies have relaxed the internal company dress code, interviews still follow the conservative standard. We've pulled together the do's and don'ts for interviewing attire as a general guide. If in doubt about interview attire at a particular company, don't be afraid to ask the recruiter what is or isn't appropriate to wear. You can also check with people you know at the company to see what others interviewing have worn.

Now may be a good time for nurses, pharmacists, radiologists, pharmacy technicians and others to review how best to negotiate their salaries, says Frank Heasley, PhD, president and CEO, MedZilla, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR Professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science. “There are shortages across the board in nursing, pharmacy, radiology and in some areas of biotech. What better time to flex your muscle and try to get the highest possible salary,” Heasley says.

THOUGHT PROCESS:
The Hiring Manager is looking for your perception of what the representative does every day. They are also looking for work ethic (working early, late) and commitment to getting the job done. The more you can parallel what you are currently doing to the pharmaceutical representative's day, the better off you are. Show them you have done research and have spoken with someone in the industry.

TERMINATION. The word itself has different meanings depending on the context. In the situation where it is used to describe the end of one's employment, there is but one interpretation; he or she will be unemployed and finding a new job will not be easy. With a larger percentage of corporations in America undergoing reorganization or "downsizing", a greater number of employees, including engineers and scientists, will see themselves in this unfortunate position. Furthermore, once the initial shock of "termination" wears off, it is often replaced with a feeling of panic; how do I find a new job? Relax. There is a very effective method that can be used to conduct a successful job search. It is known as NETWORKING. If used effectively, networking can be a rewarding experience which will often result in a better position in terms of job satisfaction and salary.

This is a story about Bob. Bob was an engineer employed with a manufacturing company for eight years. One day in March, Bob was called into his supervisor's office and told that, due to unfortunate economic conditions, the company was forced to scale back, and hence Bob's position would be eliminated. Bob was overjoyed. He was single with no major financial responsibilities and was about to receive several month's severance, the use of an out-placement firm, and unemployment insurance. Bob was also "confident" that he could find another position shortly; after all, he had eight years of experience, a Master's degree, and since he was single, the ability to move anywhere he wanted.

As a 6-year veteran of pharmaceutical sales recruiting I answer this question with an absolute YES and NO. How can my answer be both yes and no? Well, if you correctly prepare, your interviews should be an easy flowing conversation about you, the company and the job opportunity. If you don't correctly prepare and know what to expect during the pharmaceutical interview you will get flattened! Guaranteed! Competition for a pharmaceutical sales position is too tight to just "wing it" and hope you get the position with a big smile and witty answers.

Breaking into pharmaceutical sales is hard work. Throughout life, you learn "life rules" like "respect your elders" and "wear a shirt at the dinner table". Likewise, there are pharmaceutical job-hunting rules…secrets. Only nobody has told you them. However, I'm going to tell you a couple of my secrets, but not all of them, because I still want to earn a living in my industry of choice.

In this report we will look at NLP and at one of the fundamental tools of NLP which will prove extremely powerful in helping you to have more confidence, enthusiasm and fun when meeting people. And after you apply what you learn in this report you will find it easy to make a great first impression whenever you want to despite your interview nerves.

CAREER TRANSITION

If you want to get your dream job, take some time to learn and master these five skills that will set you apart from the crowd and make you a much more desirable hire for any company executive with whom you interview.

Employee confidence within the pharma, biotech and medical devices sectors is growing with 4 out of 5 professionals in the US citing they have no real concerns over their future job security, according to a new report published by Real.

Marysville, WA - Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO of Medzilla.com, says that he has never seen so many nurses posting for pharmaceutical sales positions. According to Dr. Heasley, there have been days during the last three or four months when half the nurses coming to the site were looking for jobs as pharmaceutical sales representatives.

In most industries, a sales representative is a sales representative. If you understand the basic principles of what a successful sales professional does in auto sales, for example, you understand what representatives are doing in other industries the majority of the time. It may come as a surprise, then, that sales representatives in the medical and biotech fields have the capacity to become a completely different kind of strategic partner for the clients they work with. Set aside any mental image you might have of stereotypical door-to-door salesmen or Heather Locklear's character on Scrubs!

Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi wrote in her book Stiffed about men being at the mercy of cultural forces that disfigure their lives and destroy their happiness. Enter men in nursing, where men are but a small fraction-5.7% according to the latest statistics-of a female-run workforce, and little seems to be changing. "Men are not encouraged to go into nursing, and, for the most part, the male population is overlooked by the profession," says Frank Heasley, PhD, president and CEO, MedZilla, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR Professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.

This is a story about Bob. Bob was an engineer employed with a manufacturing company for eight years. One day in March, Bob was called into his supervisor's office and told that, due to unfortunate economic conditions, the company was forced to scale back, and hence Bob's position would be eliminated. Bob was overjoyed. He was single with no major financial responsibilities and was about to receive several month's severance, the use of an out-placement firm, and unemployment insurance. Bob was also "confident" that he could find another position shortly; after all, he had eight years of experience, a Master's degree, and since he was single, the ability to move anywhere he wanted.

RECRUITERS

It's All In The Name - Your first challenge is to get a top candidate to click on your job posting from a large, mind numbing, and repetitive list of startling similar jobs. Research shows that job seekers click on jobs based on the name and reputation of the posting company and the job title. You can't do much about your company name... but you sure can spice up your job title. Add action to your title that speaks directly to the opportunity the job offers.

Marysville, WA In his 25 years as a nurse, Graham McDougall, Jr., PhD, RN, remembers only one advertising campaign for nurses aimed at men. "I remember one of the posters … It was a young kid being examined by a male nurse and it said something like 'When I grow up I want to be a nurse just like my dad,'" Dr. McDougall said.

A recent survey by a professional recruitment society found that many hospitals continue to use strategies that they say don't work well in the recruitment of nurses and fail to use to their full potential those strategies that they say do work. The survey, done by the National Association for Health Care Recruitment (NAHCR), asked 720 member hospitals to identify strategies they're using to recruit and retain nurses and how effective they are. Two-hundred-sixty-five hospitals responded.

So one of your best employees hands in their resignation; what do you do? Final exit interviews should be a part of the resignation process. Take the time to find out why the employee is leaving. Better Pay? Burnout? Wants a flexible schedule? Colleague conflict? A personal or family illness? Make sure you identify what the employee's reason is for leaving. Then evaluate and negotiate a positive solution. Accommodate when you can, as it is more expensive to train a new employee than to retain a good one.

Since Patricia Shiu took over the OFCCP Director's position, her office had made the news on a regular basis with their ever-changing agenda. Anyone involved in audits has seen a more aggressive stance and focus during recent compliance reviews.

As a veteran of the recruiting industry, I regularly monitor emerging HR/recruitment technologies that help manage labor. About a year ago last February, I listened with interest to the rumblings about Web-based applicant tracking systems (ATSs). I had been a Resumix user in the early '90s and thought, "WOW! This could be pretty interesting."

In part one of this series, I offered seven strategies for investing in Web-based applicant tracking systems (ATS). After all, there are important questions to ask about the systems, including: How can I protect my data from becoming the property of someone else?

The Internet has truly changed the way we conduct business today. We now have the ability to do virtually everything from our computers and recruiting is one of them. More and more, health care employers are turning to the Internet to fill their positions with qualified candidates.

The traditional way of recruiting nurses is a zero-sum game in today's market, says Joe Bannon, recruitment solutions product manager, Atlanta Journal and Constitution. "There are not enough nurses to go around and the nurses that you recruit today, your competition will recruit from you tomorrow. In a zero-sum game nobody wins. You end up spending energy that should be focused elsewhere," says Bannon who will be speaking on innovative programs that are helping with the nursing shortage at the National Association for Health Care Recruitment annual meeting in Marco Island, Fla.

Biotechnology recruiting is hot. It's more active than IT and telecommunications and it isn't suffering the shortages in other areas of healthcare, says Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO, of MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR Professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.

TIPS

Electronic, or web, resumes are made using a very basic plain text format called ASCII. These types of resumes are used in all job databanks such as ours at Medzilla. Open your resume document and go to the article "Resume Tips". After you've polished the content follow the steps below to convert your resume to ASCII format.

In general, third party recruiters (headhunters) do not handle entry-level candidates (e.g., recent graduates) because their clients (employees) are not willing to pay fees for such candidates. Unless you already have several years of working experience, you should contact potential employers directly or use your college's placement office (see question Q-1.1). Very rarely temporary shortages of candidates cause recruiters to handle recent graduates in very specific fields (for example, physical therapists a few years ago).

I entered an office to make a cold call. Unbeknownst to me a 4-foot long garter snake had slithered in with me and went immediately behind a couch in the waiting room. Within moments there was complete bedlam as the snake made its presence known.

This is a favorite story around our lab. When I first started at the U I was working weekends so I could take some time off for a family reunion. Our lab had a DDS doing some research and using our expertise if you will. This guy was doing southerns and I was sequencing. I could see him in the freezer and he had an epp tube open and he was sniffing it. I just kept on working and he came over and asked me to smell his tube to see if I could smell ethanol. I said I could and didn't think anything else of it.

I had just graduated from college and was interviewing for a Hospital Sales Position with a top pharmaceutical company. The interview seemed to be going very well, and the
interviewer asked me where I was willing to go geographically, relocate. I joked with the her, claiming I would go anywhere -- except maybe Paducah, Kentucky!

I went to a physician's office to try to call on a "no see" doctor. His receptionist was at lunch, so I sat down in the waiting room, hoping the doctor would walk up front, giving me an opportunity to see him.

When I worked for NutraSweet we were doing preservative studies on the Simpless fat substitute product. The protocol stated we would use a blender to mix each preservative into a sample of the product.

He looked at me as if I was crazy, and I don't blame him. I was really mortified by doing this procedure to the small mouse. "Him," my colleague, was an expert technician. He actually had been a surgeon in his native China and he moved with ease in our small operating area for animals. I asked him why he found this simple. I was trying to get a blood sample from some mice. Sounds easy? Well, a mouse happens to be a very small animal when it comes to blood sample. The max you can get from the whole animal is 1 Ml. That means about 1/5 of a teaspoon when you bleed the animal blank. It can be gross to think about that, but bottom line: it's not much blood.